Thrill
by ArgentNoelle
Summary: It's easy enough for Bruce to find pictures. [future-fic, post-movie, Bruce is Batman][slight batjokes]


It's easy enough for Bruce to find pictures: the newspaper has nothing else for weeks. The strange monochrome images that smudge beneath his fingers; Arthur's hair turned darker than it ever was, immortalized in dusty ink. They show stills from the Murray show where he, "the Joker" had made his debut, and Bruce carefully cuts the pictures free from all that dross, those small typefaced articles screaming recrimination, trying to place blame—somewhere. Trying to understand. There is something more honest, Bruce thinks, about the photos on their own: that dark-edged smile and the suit, the splotch of blood against the far wall.

Alfred never pries into his private journals, tucked away under piles of schoolwork, and so Bruce does not worry.

It's just that there's something, something in his head that needs to know _more_—about the man who had caused the death of his parents, who had shown up outside the barred gates.

The evidence accumulates over years. Details of his history, hollow photographs clipped into worn folders, the horrible tragedy of Fleck's childhood. Bruce looks at the boy in those photographs, malnourished and crouched, the matted tangle of his hair and the smudges across his eyes, down his jaw, and tries to reconcile it with the pictures of himself; the photo that curious policeman had snapped the morning he had been found, a creature huddled into the shell of his parents' bodies.

There is the mug-shot, of course: the man there seems to hover between Arthur and Joker, not quite either. He is grinning, and his eyes are wild. _Look at me_, they seem to say. _If you dare_. The lipstick has been washed away from his smile, along with the paint on his face. As if to prove he is only, in fact, human.

But it fails: there is an uncanniness in the image that is worse for all the outward mundanity.

Shots of the Joker when he breaks out: from security feeds, when Bruce can find them. The news never tires of the Joker's smile. He poses, sometimes, as he is recaptured, as though he is a celebrity surrounded by adoring fans. One hand out, the fingers fluttering strangely, the smile knowing. Bruce finds the smile everywhere, repeated through the media as though it is battling for ubiquitousness: as though maybe it will cease to hold such horrible fascination. Like Campbell's soup, each one is the same, though the angle and size change, and Bruce fills pages only with the smile, cut from the rest of Arthur's face, as though to see through a viewfinder, for a clearer image: _this_ is the important bit. If only he knew why.

Bruce has his own plans for the future; a persona taking shape in the darkness of the caves beneath, a grotesque winged nightmare. Along with that, as if by accident, he gathers detritus, turning up in his nets: whispers of Arthur's doings, abandoned joker cards, sharp-edged. He fills the journal cover to cover, and boxes; formulas dot the pages, smilex and its antidote in fragile glass. He's always been a collector, and the cave is full of Bruce's scattered whimsy, the evidence of his antagonists' most memorable exploits, but sometimes the corner that is Joker's seems to gain a shadowed power, like a shrine. He tries to pretend it's anything but.

The computer screens from ceiling to floor can show every angle, and he has the files ready: with only one click of a button every image of Joker, Arthur, can be cast up in relief, like paintings against the cave wall, a rotating screensaver of that face, that red-lipped smile. He stares at it in order to know, or to remind himself of what he does not know: to divorce the image from the meaning, to confront the terror of _merely the man_.

In later years he is more guarded, but when he had been yet an uncertain child Arthur had found his entrance too easy: the open window of his bedroom, a grey-edged morning. Bruce had woken to the soft, steady pad of footsteps across the floor, a dance, its shadows cast against the wall. He'd blinked his eyes open, recognized the possibility of his own death, and sat up.

"You've missed me," Arthur said, pausing in his dance, smiling softly at Bruce. Their eyes traveled to the drawers all opened, from which everything was flung across the floor, all but the notebook, which stood open to the images of Arthur, stolen and hoarded.

"I didn't," Bruce said.

Arthur chuckled quietly, and did not argue.

Bruce still doesn't know which is more depraved: the shameless way the Joker calls for his attention, strewing the streets with dead bodies like a line of breadcrumbs, or the fanatical way Batman combs through the scenes when they are done, looking for any abandoned gadget, or lock of hair.

.

.

.


End file.
